Dick Gephardt was extolling the virtues of Mark McGwire, a part-time constituent of the St. Louis congressman’s, when I kidding-on-the-square alluded to the baseball star’s penchant for controversial testosterone-enhancing pills.
“But it’s legal!” said Gephardt, just like the Cardinals-loving politician-lawyer that he is.
Yes, the pills are legal. And so is our unseemly campaign finance system with demands that partly explain why Gephardt, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, was in his office, not trekking through Iowa or New Hampshire.
Gephardt was supposed to be running for president about now, providing a left-of-center challenge to Vice President Al Gore, who will be trekking through Iowa and New Hampshire on Monday and Tuesday. Instead, he’s now concentrating on trying to get even more spacious offices by helping to lead a Democratic recapture of the House.
Gephardt is an interesting character. He was a founder of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council. He once opposed abortion, school busing and raising the minimum wage but changed his positions on all three. He also voted for the big Ronald Reagan tax cut in 1981.
But a leftward turn included voting against NAFTA as he fought, unsuccessfully, for reasonable environmental and labor provisions. He is a strong ally of organized labor and is among the many in his party who have pilloried President Clinton’s private conduct but ultimately defended him in the impeachment inquiry.
In Gephardt’s case, a reputation for personal propriety and self-discipline makes him a sort of charisma-challenged Anti-Clinton. The family photos scattered around his office apparently reflect a genuine set of values, which is why he surely shakes his head when considering the galling Clinton mix of political success and personal misconduct.
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He ran for president once and seemingly was positioned to run this time, figuring on staying afloat if Gore faltered. One reason he is staying behind is money.
“You gotta have enough money to keep going,” he said, picking on a Spartan lunch of mostly melons. “That’s the problem. If you don’t have enough dough after Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s over.”
Now what exactly does that mean?
It means that to run and win in 2000, you have to raise as much as $30 million by April 2000. Gephardt suggests that you’ll need $20 million by Jan. 1.
Raising that $20 million means raising $60,000 a day. That’s staggering, even if you factor in the occasional mega-dinner, such as the one Bill Bradley had in Chicago last week, bringing in an excess of $1 million.
Generally, one can’t raise more than $1,000 a pop, unless one takes from political action committees, which can give a maximum of $5,000. Some candidates, such as Bradley, are refusing to take money from PACs.
“In 1988, we only did three things,” Gephardt said. “Iowa, New Hampshire and money. We probably spent as much time on money as Iowa, and Iowa was 300 days or something in four years,” meaning that’s how much time he spent there personally.
“Getting the money is hard,” he said. “A thousand dollars a clip. And when you talk about raising more than $20 million or $25 million, in the bank before the first event (primary) even starts, you are talking about a huge-volume operation.”
He amended himself, saying you need a “monstrous-volume operation. And people don’t automatically give you $1,000 dollars. You need either others who can raise it for you from their friends and associates, getting them to come to events and pledging to raise $1,000, or you have to sit down and call thousands and thousands. That’s what’s formidable about it.”
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal last week, fundraising consultant Stan Huckaby estimated that a winner needs at least 20,000 donors to give $500 or more. But the universe of such donors, he estimated, is only about 65,000 on the Republican side. So you will have nearly a dozen candidates trying to hit up all those same people.
The initial $250 of any contribution triggers federal matching funds for a candidate, assuming he agrees to take the money. But the actual fund for those monies has been shrinking because fewer Americans check that little box on their tax return. In addition, given the way it’s dispensed, it won’t come in time to pay most primary election bills when needed.
Gephardt recalls that, partly because of how much one must spend to raise money (hiring fundraisers, for one), you can wind up in his 1988 bind. He raised $13 million but had most of it spent by the time the Iowa caucuses were over, leaving precious little for New Hampshire television or the 12 state primaries that constituted “Super Tuesday.”
“We cobbled together and borrowed and sold the car, to get together a million dollars for Super Tuesday,” he recalled, somewhat euphemistically. “But that was a pitiful amount for 12 states.”
This campaign, it will be tougher. There could be 18 primaries on one day, including the big whoppers of California, New York and Florida, all enormously expensive television markets.
The system, said the man who hoped to be king, is driving us to a place where “only wealthy people can write the checks and compete in this.”
The Nixon legacy
You still can’t get rid of Richard Nixon.
There is an odd court proceeding here in which the Nixon estate is seeking in excess of $200 million for the former president’s tapes and papers. The Justice Department is disputing the estate, in part claiming that many of the tapes are so embarrassing the estate wouldn’t for a second consider putting them up for sale, unless they severely edited them.
Last Tuesday, an Oct. 2, 1971, Oval Office tape was played by the government. Nixon and top aide H.R. Haldeman were upset over reports in the Los Angeles Times that Nixon’s nominee to be treasurer of the United States had many illegal immigrants working on her estate.
Nixon can be heard calling Atty. Gen. John Mitchell, his longtime chum, and declaring: “There’s one thing that I want done and I don’t want any argument about it. I want you to direct the most trusted person you have in the immigration service, that they are to look over all of the activities of the Los Angeles Times. All. Underlined. . . . And to see whether they’re violating the wetback thing. . . . (Times publisher) Otis Chandler, I want him checked with the gardener, his gardener. I understand he is a wetback. Is that clear?”
Nixon also suggests a tax investigation of Chandler, while Haldeman notes that the Los Angeles immigration official “whose name, interestingly, is Rosenberg” is quoted in the stories.
Nixon calls Mitchell again. “He’s a kike by the name of Rosenberg. He is to be out. He is to be out. Get him out. I want his resignation on my desk by the end of the day. Is that clear? Rosenberg is to go. He is to go. I leave it to you to come up with an excuse. He’s been on television. That should be enough.”
The language, as the world has seen in previous tapes, is all too typical of Nixon, as University of Wisconsin historian Stanley Kutler acknowledged when I mentioned this conversation to him Friday. Kutler is the expert on Nixon tapes.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is trying to figure out whether to make this all public. Even though played in a public courtroom, it technically isn’t.
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The tapes played in court are yet to be transcribed and are not transcribed by the court reporter. Copies aren’t being given out. In a few cases, such as the above, tapes can be listened to by anyone at the National Archives in College Park, Md. But again, no actual copies are given out.
As a result of inquiries by myself and CBS News, Justice Department lawyers huddled Friday. Attorney Neil Kaslow, who is running their side, said there’s no clear precedent but “my position will be that these should be freely and openly accessible” once placed into evidence, which has technically not yet happened.
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.